Hi, I’m Courtney Maynard!

I am a 2nd year Computer Science PhD Student at Northeastern University, advised by Prof. Tina Eliassi-Rad in the RADLAB. I’m lucky to be a part of the Network Science Institute as well as Khoury College. I attended William & Mary and graduated in May 2025 with my Bachelors of Science in Data Science, with Honors. My research interests lie in mechanistic interpretability, particularly circuit learning and any other place where I can fit in some graphs/graph neural networks! I am motivated by a desire to ensure that new AI systems are not only understandable by the general population, but used safely. Particularly, I am interested in problems surrounding sycophantic models and persona injections. I am also passionate about public impact and social good projects (read about my summer at the Data Science for Social Good Fellowship here!).

Some Extras

• I am an avid long distance runner and you can often find me running through the Fens or on the Charles River Esplanade at sunset. I am currently training for the Boston Half.
• I sing, play guitar, and write music. My undergraduate honors thesis, “Synchronizing Graph and Embedding Representations of Lyrical Data with Graph Neural Networks and Developing a Classification-to-Generation Workflow For Genre-Specific Songs” was inspired by my love of songwriting!
• I am a data science “nepo baby”; my dad works in data analytics and is the initial reason I wanted to explore machine learning in college! Thanks, Dad!